Quick Hack: Emojis at your fingertips!

[AdrianLunsong]

I can’t believe that emojis were only officially baked into Connect at the beginning of this year!! Before then, it was still supported but you had to copy and paste your emojis or use a keyboard that supported them. I remember how it wasn’t an issue if I was using Connect on my mobile (most mobile keyboards have emojis) but when I switched to desktop, I had to have a separate emoji site opened to copy and paste my emojis into my posts/comments!

These days I use Connect a lot more on my desktop and as a fan of emojis (they are soooooo ‘kawaii’ ) I found myself reaching up to press the ‘insert emoji’ button in the comment toolbar quite a bit. Switching my hand from keyboard to mouse to do so was an irritant, an inefficiency that was mildly annoying.

That is, until I stumbled across a quick hack to easily add them by simply typing on your keyboard (excluding mobile phone users, you lucky folks)!

Click the ‘insert emoji’ button in your post/comment toolbar and as you mouse the various emojis, you’ll see that at the bottom of the selection bubble, it actually gives out the text equivalent of the emoji!

So, I thought I’d try to type out the text equivalent and voila… magic! Much like when you type @ and Connect activates the UI for selecting usernames, when you type :gr, Connect activates the UI for selecting emojis (those that have ‘gr’ in their names though).

Try typing :fa and you’ll get the following selection:

Or when you type :cat, you’ll get the following selection:

And you would then use the arrow keys on your keyboard to choose your emoji. So now I don’t need to reach for my mouse as often as I used to! I hope you’ve enjoyed this quick hack and if you know of any other quick hacks do let me know in the comments below! I’m always keen to speed myself up as much as possible!

And before I go, I’ll leave you with this emoticon that I only just learned about from listening to an audiobook!

orz

Yup, that above is basically an emoticon representing someone bowing or kneeling! The o is the head, the r is the arm, and z is the body and leg. Personally, I think this °rz is cuter and dimensionally more proportional! Ah, the fascinating stuff that we get to learn on the internet!

[SholaIB]

Hello @AdrianLunsong thanks for the info. I suppose this is only for desktop user isn’t it? Will try it out the next time I get on the desktop. I use my mobile more for connect activities.

Thanks for the post. Nice weekend

[MortenCopenhagen]

, @AdrianLunsong

Here on Android Smilies are nicely integrated into the keyboard. Where I use the swift keyboard.

Cheers

Morten

[AdrianLunsong]

@SholaIB yes, the tip is only for desktop users only. You shouldn’t have any problems if you’re on mobile!

@MortenCopenhagen Is that the SwiftKey keyboard? I used to use that on mobile but switched to GBoard when that had the swipe gestures as well. Also, I didn’t realise that Microsoft has acquired SwiftKey!

[SholaIB]

I thought as much @AdrianLunsong because on mobile we use the emojis well enough already , so I wondered what the new discovery was about .

Well noted then,next time on the desktop. Thanks again.

Cheers

[TravellerG]

Thanks @AdrianLunsong

Though some of this is tips are known, I have few doubts:

• Do we have an option to create a ‘Favourite’ group or Saved Group?
• Feature to show up ‘Frequently Used’?

Thanks for your response, @C_T

[C_T]

Hello @TravellerG

Thanks for tagging.

I rarely use emojis & hence I overlooked that icon in toolbar.
Nevertheless, in my opinion, that’s redundant.

The need was to provide support for emoticons in the HTML.
Most of the Android keyboards provide emojis.
Further, on pressing the win key + semicolon combination, Windows too offers many emojis.

Here are some from that.

[Zino]

Thanks for the tip @AdrianLunsong

Thinking about it, I don’t think I’ve used an emoji on Connect before so here’s my first one

[AdrianLunsong]

@TravellerG If you’re on mobile, there should be an option to show your recent/history emojis. I use GBoard and it has that option so it’s handy as I tend to use the same ones over and over again! This is as close as you can get to Favourite/Saved/Frequently used groups.

@C_T On desktop, the emoji keyboard is only available on Windows 10 if I’m not mistaken. I use that a lot too now that I’m on Windows 10 and that is universal across all programs.

It looks like generally, most folks either already know about the quick hack to select the emoji from the Connect’s toolbar, are on mobile predominantly so don’t care about desktop, using Windows 10’s emoji keyboard or don’t care much about emojis! My needs/wants much be quite niche!

@Zino Yay!! I’ve found a convert hopefully! Emojis are fun… and I use it a lot to give an indication to folks whether I’m serious or joking… it just acts as an extra visual element in a text heavy communication.

[TravellerG]

Hello friend, @AdrianLunsong

Sorry, I was not clear - I mentioned about the Emoticon feature in Laptop;

Even though we have SEARCH feature, we do not the favourite…

Right?

by the by, dear @C_T

In Windows, we have to options, I think - Win + ; OR Wn + .